Hack-a-thoning our way out of the border backlog

Three years ago, the president of the United States and the prime minister of Canada personally launched what they called the Beyond the Border Initiative. This week, Obama administration officials will meet with counterparts in Ottawa to discuss progress to date on that initiative.

It’s worth asking whether this effort to reinvigorate the economy and address long-standing frustrations with the inefficiencies associated with doing business across the 49th parallel is actually working.

At the time they created BTB, the president and the PM recognized that, after NAFTA’s initial surge of success, our common border has become a competitive disadvantage for business. The cumbersome paperwork and resulting delays at key crossings meant that the billion dollars per day in bilateral trade was at risk. It is easier, in terms of border hassles, to import a car into North America from Germany or Korea than to manufacture the car jointly at facilities in Windsor and Detroit where the component parts cross the border five or six times (with all the resulting inspections, paperwork and delays) before reaching market.

So this Thursday, officials from both countries will meet to discuss BTB, take stock of progress and plan next steps. The officials also will meet with stakeholders from both countries to get inputs from us on what’s going well and what can be improved. We will each be given about three minutes to give our thoughts. So here is CABC’s recommendation — our two cents in three minutes.

We believe that the BTB effort is making good progress at both addressing inefficiencies and enhancing security measures at the border, to the benefit of both Canadians and Americans. Our only quibble is that progress is much too slow. We in the private sector can be extremely nimble and we like to see real results each quarter of each year. Governments, in contrast, tend to make changes at a glacial pace. That said, on occasion, governments have taken action and solved problems quickly.

Take the example of Hurricane Sandy — a devastating storm that ravaged the upper east coast of the U.S. In addition to the loss of life, thousands lost power. Homes and businesses were destroyed. People needed gasoline to evacuate, or to fuel their generators. Lines at gas stations stretched for miles and people waited hours to fuel up — only to find out the station had run out of gas or didn’t have the power to pump it.

What did the Obama administration do? It came up with a collaboration between Esso, Google and a high school class in New Jersey. The class had been following the tweets of people stranded in gas station line-ups. Esso shared information about which stations still had gas and power to pump it. Google provided map information. The result was a quick way for people to find the nearest working gas station and estimated wait time to pump.

In an age when you can run household appliances with a tap on an iPhone from thousands of miles away, why can’t you submit and review a truck manifest without it taking hours or days?

Why wait for a crisis to bring together the brain power to improve cross-border trade? We propose that the White House and PCO/PMO convene a hack-a-thon to solve our border delays. The challenge is straightforward. Governments need information in order to assess whether to allow goods into the country. Shippers want clarity and simplicity in the information they are required to submit. Border personnel would love to spend less time evaluating reams of confusing forms and more time focusing on high-risk cargo. So it’s just a question of sharing information in a way that is not overly confusing for the customer or the government.

Companies like Amazon, Google and Uber are great at collecting information and making the customer interface very simple. You can buy things with one click. Why not get companies like these together and ask them to come up with an easy way for governments to electronically gather and review shipping info in order to expedite clearance across the border? In an age when you can run household appliances with a tap on an iPhone from thousands of miles away, why can’t you submit and review a truck manifest without it taking hours or days?

One American CEO told me last week that when he has a project in Canada, he builds in two to three extra weeks for paperwork and adds 10 to 20 per cent of total cost just to get his equipment and personnel from the U.S. into Canada. His trucks always cross on weekends to avoid most of the commercial traffic, and they plan for a minimum of five extra hours to sit at the border, waiting for their paperwork to be reviewed and cleared. He, like many others, also notes that the rules and requirements are so convoluted that border officials have different interpretations of what’s admissible and what’s not each time he sends a truck across.

The idea of simplifying and modernizing the paperwork associated with crossing the border is not new; in fact it’s included in the BTB Initiative. It’s just taking forever. E-manifests and one-window clearance aren’t scheduled to be fully operational until 2016 at the earliest. That’s because the officials working on the project are not hackers from Silicon Valley.

As former U.S. ambassador to Canada Gordon Giffin likes to say, “Even if you’re on the right track, if you don’t move quickly enough, you’ll get run over.”

It’s time to pick up the pace with BTB. Let’s do a hack-a-thon and get this thing done by Thanksgiving.

Maryscott Greenwood is senior advisor with the Canadian American Business Council and senior managing director with McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP in Washington D.C.

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